David Cage Working on Two Projects, Wants to Create “Emotional War Game”

March 3, 2011
Written by Sebastian Moss

Heavy Rain pushed the envelope of emotional gaming and the medium as an art form, creating new experiences for gamers that resonated with the maturer PlayStation audience. Ever since the game’s release, fans of creator David Cage have been waiting with baited breath for any news on his next project, which was promised to push the boundaries once more. Luckily for these fans, the Quantic Dream CEO has finally spilled the beans – or at least some of them – during this year’s Game Developer’s Conference.

Speaking to CVG, Cage announced that the company is working on two “very different” projects, which sadly he kept rather tight lipped on, but he also revealed that once the games are completed he aims on reinventing the shooter genre. Potentially influenced by Apocalypse Now and Platoon, the game would take “a different approach”, focusing on the seriousness of war, without glorifying it.

I want to create a genre, I want to convince more people that [emotional gaming] is a valid direction for the industry; to show them that this was not just one product, one story. It’s a format that can be used to tell any kind of story in any genre with any tone.

Continuing:

I would really like the opportunity to work on a different type of game. I would love to see if what we discovered could be applied to a first-person shooter, for example.

With Cage having to finish his other two projects first, the game is far from a certainty, with the developer admitting that the exact genre hasn’t been finalised:

First person, I don’t know. But a game about war is something I would like to do, just to see if we could get closer to the film side; not gloryfying war, but talking about it from a realistic point of view.

War is not fun. Talking about what the people involved, what they feel, how horrible it can be. This is something I think could be very exciting and very new for the games industry. When we talk about war, it’s always a very ‘cool’ thing – you have these big guns and you kill loads of people.

I would really like to take a different approach; to tell a story about politics [with it] or something a little more serious. I would like to use what we discovered in Heavy Rain in this fantastic medium of interactivity to say something meaningful. This is probably one of the next things I’m going to try.

When asked about the game’s potential threat to games like Call of Duty, Cage explained:

I think it would be an important way to evangelise [to] people. To say, ‘Look – if you get with more emotion and storytelling, it leads you to a more interesting experience. There is room for more than just games which get you with adrenaline.

The idea certainly sounds intriguing, and hopefully it will become a reality, with Cage seemingly adamant that he wants to work on the project:

I’m going to work on it. It’s really something I want to do.

Would you be interested to see a more serious take on the shooter genre, or do you crave the adrenaline packed shooters that are currently available?